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Amalia Ulman (born 1989) is an Argentine-Spanish artist and film director whose practice includes performance, Installation art, Video art and Internet art works. Her work deals with issues of class, gender, sexuality, and Middlebrow. In 2021, Ulman made her feature film debut, with El Planeta.
In 2009, she left Spain to study at Central Saint Martins in London, where she graduated in 2011. In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound Lines bus accident that left her with a permanent disability.
In 2014, she presented two solo shows in Los Angeles, Used & New at ltd Los Angeles and Delicious Works at Smart Objects, also in LA.
The same year Ulman started Excellences & Perfections, a four-month performance on her Instagram account where she fabricated fictional characters whose story unfolded in three different episodes. Her intention was to prove how easy an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes.Francesca Gavin, Kaleidoscope#23, Winter 2015. Instagram were mainly taken sneaking into hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles and posted as if they were documenting a real life. Emilie Friedlander The Fader, November 2014 It is a work that shifts the location of performance art and also extends ideas about feminist performance. Excellences and Perfections was later chosen to be a part of the Electronic Superhighway Exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 2016.
In October 2014, during Frieze Art Fair, Ulman presented a solo show The Destruction of Experience at Evelyn Yard in London. For the show Ulman made "The Future Ahead", a video essay about Justin Bieber's "growth from angelic teenager to hetero-normative white male".
In January 2015, she presented Stock Images of War, her first solo show in New York City at James Fuentes Gallery. It is an immersive Installation art composed of twelve simple wire-frame sculptures, each one being named after a different month of the year – i.e. "War in January", "War in February", etc. Towards the end of the same year, Ulman started Privilege, a second, year long, Instagram performance that lasted until shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The work presented an exaggerated version of Ulman that explored multiplicity in a corporate office setting.
In 2016 Excellences and Perfections was selected to be included in the group exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern, London (February—June 2016). The exhibition, examined the relationship between photography and performance, brought together over 500 works spanning 150 years from the invention of photography to the selfie-culture of today. Through Ulman's Instagram-based project, social media was examined in the historical context of photographic performances. The installation was also part of the exhibition Electronic Highway at Whitechapel Gallery in London. Ulman has been described as the first social network-based artist to enter top institutional galleries, and the "First great Instagram Artist" by Elle magazine.
In 2018, Excellences & Perfections was published as a book by Prestel. It includes the Instagram posts that she used for the project and essays by German artist Hito Steyerl, editor Rob Horning and others.
Ulman's next film will deal with climate change and will be shot in northern Argentina, where she was born.
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